A Lovely Weekend in Antigua

Friday night, as planned, Hannah and I cooked my mom's suggested recipe of camp-style ground beef-and-vegetables-over-rice.

'Twas delicious! :)

Saturday afternoon Hannah and I caught a ride with our landlord's son, Guicho, to Antigua, where we stayed the night. We stopped at the Spanish language school where our landlord's daughter, Ana, is the administrative director and where I will be starting classes next Monday. It's in the renovated building of an ancient convent, classes will be outside on a rooftop patio under a trellis of bougainvillea (I finally learned how to spell that!) with an amazing view of the surrounding colonial town and mountains.

Hannah and I rented a room for the night in the building that Ana rents a room in. The room we had actually happened to be the one that another field coordinator, Kristen, lived in for three months and just moved out of recently. The building is really beautiful and old (300 years or so?).


After we dropped off our stuff, we were released upon the town! Which was great. We don't get much wandering around time in Guatemala City, so it was really relaxing and fun to be able to explore a little on our own, with no responsibilities for the rest of the day. We went to Fernando's Kaffee, looked into some shops, then had a nice dinner at El Sabor del Tiempo, an Italian restaurant where Hannah ordered a Greek cheeseburger (whatever that means) and I ordered braised rabbit, which we enjoyed even when the electricity went out. What's better than a candlelit dinner? A surprise candlelit dinner!

After dinner we went back to our room and grabbed some rainjackets. We met up with Kristen and got to see her cute little apartment she rents. The three of us walked to Café No Sé, a really cool little place with lots of foreigners. We hung out there until late, met some other people living in Antigua, ate lots of free popcorn, and generally had a good time.

Sunday morning Hannah and I were awoken around 7:00 by the sound of not-so-distant marching bands. When we got up later and went outside, we found a parade consisting of half a dozen marching bands taking turns playing, stretching down several blocks of street. We narrowly missed getting impaled by a trombone as we walked past.

Our breakfast spot Sunday morning (a nice, slow, 10:00 AM sort of breakfast) was Café Rainbow, which might be my new favorite spot in Antigua. It's a restaurant, bar, and bookstore, with lots of live music and lectures and fun stuff like that. Very much a tourist-and-expat joint, mostly things in English, but we still got to speak Spanish to the waitress. I love Guatemalan típico ("typical") breakfasts (and I'm not allergic to them, generally) which consist of beans, rice, a couple of eggs, and some tortillas. Some places add plátanos, this place had a small salad, and some local white cheese (which I pawn off on someone else). Hannah got some sort of breakfasty sandwich. I'd love to go back for lunch or dinner sometime, maybe catch some live music.

After breakfast we wandered around some more, looked into more shops, braved the gauntlet that is every touristy local crafts market, and enjoyed the beautiful, if hot, day.

We got tacos for lunch at Tacontento. At some point we ended up in the main square and got interviewed by a Guatemalan woman taking a test for her English class. She was definitely a beginner, but it was fun and made us feel good about our Spanish skills.

So, we headed back to Guatemala City Sunday evening. We bought some more ground beef (actually, the package doesn't say "beef" on it anywhere, so we're really just assuming it's beef) since we didn't have much food left in the fridge, but we didn't even get into our rooms before we decided to try calling Pollo Campero ("Country Chicken") and ordering home delivery! I worked through the ordering process over the phone, even though it's hard for me to understand Spanish when it's not in person, and we were all set to get our dinner sent to us.

We realized shortly after we had ordered that we had no electricity and wouldn't have been able to cook anyway. We worried about our ground beef in our dinky little refrigerator and raced the sun to eat our dinner when it arrived less than half an hour later (by motorcycle!). Pollo Campero is delicious. Better by far than Pollo Brujo ("Wizard Chicken").

The rest of the evening we got around with flashlights. We entertained ourselves with podcasts and tried not to think about the unusually high numbers of dead cockroaches lying around outside and the three large spiders Hannah spotted crawling out of our kitchen ceiling.We didn't have electricity until later that night when we had just fallen asleep, when suddenly all of the lights turned on again at once and we had to get up and turn them all off.

This is our last week in Guatemala City! This Sunday Hannah's headed up to Xela and I'm headed back to Antigua to take Spanish classes for a month or two. We're both really excited and ready for this next chapter in our adventure!